5 ms·
EPIC - Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instruction_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expl
by mnw21cam 11y ago
EPIC - Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instruction_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instructio...
That means that the compiler works out the parallelism rather than the CPU, which is meant to reduce the amount of silicon wasted on instruction decode/parallelism.
Anyone remember Transmeta?
- yvdriess 11y agoYes, Transmeta was bought by Intel. x86, despite its quirks, does not seem to be holding back the hardware too much. The silicon for decode/ILP does a fantastic job.
- Symmetry 11y agoIntel just liscenced their patents the same way that NVidia did. NVidia later hired much of the team and their Project Denver core is essentially the Efficeon 2.0.
- Symmetry 11y agoTransmeta is more a traditional VLIW processor which is a bit different in some ways that EPIC. On an Itanium you're indicating to the chips that these N instructions can take place on the same clock cycle (even if they're spread out across multiple cycles in theory) and there are some nifty tricks with trying to reduce memory latency variability. Transmeta had what's known as an exposed pipeline VLIW design. If you tell the multiplier to do it's thing and put the result in Register 6 then you can still read the previous value from register 6 until the multiplication is done. So you always need to recompile for each version of the hardware.
- burnte 11y agoMy bad, I don't know why I typed extremely. however, while yes the compiler does a lot of work, it's an entirely different method of programming than most coders are used to, which make it painful to change to.